updated 04:16 pm EST, Wed November 28, 2012

Chrome gains new PDF, Passbook hooks

Google has posted updates to two of its flagship iOS apps, Chrome and Drive. Chrome 23.0.1271.91 supports opening PDFs in other apps, and can save tickets and boarding passes to Passbook in iOS 6. To cope with garbled text on webpages, a text encoding detection option has been added under Settings.

Drive 1.2.0 has been upgraded to allow making, editing, or collaborating on spreadsheets, using basic tools. The app has also been system-registered, meaning that files can be uploaded to Drive using the "Open in" command in third-party apps. A dedicated Uploads tab meanwhile shows progress and recent transfers, and the app's copy/paste function now supports rich text.

Missing from the Drive iOS app is the Android version's ability to edit text within tables in documents, and add homescreen shortcuts for any Drive file. For all platforms Chrome and Drive are free downloads.